They say Christmas season gets earlier every year, and the same seems to apply to CES. The year’s biggest tech show is a little less than a month away, yet Samsung’s already showing off what’s likely to be two of its bigger debuts for the show. Both are updates to the company’s solid Notebook 9 line of Windows PCs. Read More

Wizeline, a provider of outsourced programming services, is expanding its global footprint with agreements to partner with a slew of development shops across Southeast Asia. Founded in 2014, the company’s vision is to provide programming jobs for developers in emerging markets to unlock the local talent pool and expose a new generation and geographies to the startup world. Read More

Pace, a London startup that has developed tech that uses machine learning to let hotels set room prices dynamically based on demand, has raised £2.5 million in seed funding. The financing round is led by InterGlobe, with participation from Seedcamp, Speedinvest, and Amadeus Capital Partners. The company says it will use the new capital to invest in its tech and marketing teams. Read More

Match Group, which houses a large portfolio of dating app brands – including most notably, Tinder, Match, and OKCupid – is prepping a notable upgrade to one of its older brands: Plenty of Fish. The dating service, often dubbed ‘POF’ by its users, was founded in 2003 then sold to Match Group in 2015 for $575 million. But it has since remained fairly quiet, in terms of… Read More

At a special AI-focused event today in San Francisco, Microsoft announced a number of feature updates to Bing that it hopes will make results smarter by leveraging the company’s AI research, as well as a new partnership with Reddit. Read More

Microsoft introduced the Azure Bot Framework more than two years ago and companies have been building chatbots for a variety of scenarios ever since. Today, the company made generally available the Microsoft Azure Bot Service and Microsoft Cognitive Language Understanding service (known as LUIS). Read More

Mobile AR from Apple, Google and Facebook and computer vision/machine learning (CV/ML) are focusing the minds and wallets of VCs in Silicon Valley, China and beyond. The $2.5 billion invested in AR/VR so far this year was balanced across AR and VR, but now mobile AR and CV/ML are the new hotness. I spoke to a few friends about how the investment market has evolved. Read More

Comcast has promised before that it does not and will not engage in paid prioritization, and today the company has reiterated that stance — after being called out for having apparently weakened it over the last year. Read More

We all love to share GIFs — and there are plenty of ways to do that, through online portals or keyboards — but often times because there is so much content, you’ll end up surfacing up a lower-fidelity GIF.
There can be plenty of copies of the same video clips as a GIF, or maybe it’s just difficult to capture and upload, but Gfycat hopes that it can be solved at a… Read More

Is it worse if a robot instead of a human is used to deter the homeless from setting up camp outside places of business?
One such bot cop recently took over the outside of the San Francisco SPCA, an animal advocacy and pet adoption clinic in the city’s Mission district, to deter homeless people from hanging out there — causing some people to get very upset.
Silicon Valley game… Read More

Loans can be the hardest to get for the people who need them the most.
An estimated 45 million Americans don’t have a credit score and others have trouble bringing up their scores, even if they are in a better financial position than in years past.
While most lenders would consider low-income families with bad credit scores to be too risky, a startup called INSIKT believes that it… Read More

While some folks still head to the stores on Black Friday and throughout December, many of us are turning to the web for Christmas shopping. Just one complication: shipping tends to bottleneck during the holidays and some gifts simply don’t arrive on time.
But we’ve sorted all that out for you.
Here are the order deadlines for folks buying their gifts online who want them delivered… Read More

PepsiCo is the latest company to reveal that it’s placed orders for Tesla’s forthcoming electric semi-truck – and also the company with the largest order so far. The beverage company has ordered 100 of the trucks per Reuters, meaning it’s placed at least a $20,000 deposit for each of those since Tesla rose the down payment amount for its original $5,000 starting… Read More

Sophia Amoruso famously founded the retailer Nasty Gal, growing it from an eBay store that sold vintage items to a darling of the fashion world that was seeing more than $300 million in sales at one point. Somewhere along the way, however, Nasty Gal lost its way. In the meantime, Amoruso is on to a new business, and now it’s venture-backed. Read More

One would think that the classification of internet providers as telecoms or not, and which federal agency has authority over them, is about as in the weeds as it gets. But it is a symptom of the times in which we live that no issue, however technical, provincial or jurisdictional, can escape being swept up in the eternal hurricane of partisan politics. Read More